So, fun fact, there have been several drafts of this post. This game should be easy to write about; it's my all-time favorite videogame. I've replayed the story mode many times. I fell in love with it the minute I saw it on a GameCube demo disc. I didn't know anything about Sonic the Hedgehog before then. I had vague memories of watching an old cartoon called Sonic Underground before then but I'd had no idea it was part of a massive multimedia franchise. For all I knew this was a completely unrelated product. I just knew the Mario Kart Double Dash and SuperStore demo kiosks of the first two levels of Sonic Adventure 2 weren't enough. I never could have known that this game would cause a life-long obsession.
Part of what has made writing about this game so hard is the absolute enormity of the impact it had on my life - not just the time I first played it, but even to this day. I still play Sonic the Hedgehog games. They are among the only games I pre-order. And it's a great time to love Sonic games because they've never been better. Each new release rewards long-term investment in this franchise in a way I never would have expected. And so much of it is thanks to the lasting impact Sonic Adventure 2 has had on its players.
In writing about Star Wars Episode I: Battle for Naboo, I spoke about how much renting videogames and consoles became a staple of my summer vacations growing up. Eventually we stopped renting a Nintendo 64 and started renting a GameCube instead, including all the cool games we'd seen on those demo discs. Naturally that meant Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. But while we could rent consoles and games, we couldn't rent memory cards, so we never actually got to see all of Sonic Adventure 2 while we rented it with our progress being wiped the minute we shut off the system. I even remember one week where we just never turned off the console and left it on overnight so that we could pick back up and try the levels we were stuck on. As long as we could only rent it, we could never finish Sonic Adventure 2. But our summer rental weeks would eventually come to an end.
When I was 12, my parents told me I was going to get a job delivering newspapers. I delivered The Daily Gleaner in the neighborhood I grew up in on and off for three years, carrying a big sack full of almost 40 papers at my peak before or after school. I don't even know if kids can still get this gig anymore. It wasn't fun. But it was good money to a 12-year-old, enough for my brother Aidan and I to save up for our own GameCube. Our parents relented and said we could, finally relaxing their years-long mandate to never let a game console stay in the house longer than a week, and we took full advantage of the timing. The Jumbo Video down the street from us was making space for the upcoming 7th generation of gaming, so we actually bought the copy of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle we'd been renting for years. And we bought a memory card. It was time to finally make it to the final boss.
Or at least, that was the plan. It didn't really work out that way. It took us forever just to beat the story mode. With three different play styles per story - high-speed platforming, treasure hunting, and run-and-gun combo shooting - it was a lot to keep track of. If you think finishing story mode is the end of the game though, you're sorely mistaken. There's also a boss rush mode, a kart racer, the Chao Garden virtual pet simulator, and five missions per story level. Each thing gave you one out of 180 completion markers called emblems. Not only did you have to do all of this, but you also needed to hit a certain high score on all the missions to get graded an A, and you got an additional emblem for getting an A on every mission with each character. There was so much to do that it was just easier to play the multiplayer levels or replay the story mode.
But over the years me and my brothers chipped away at everything because we'd heard there was a cool bonus at the end of the game if you got all the emblems. We were all good at one thing or another. I took on the kart racing and the boss rushes, Aidan did the Chao raising and shoot-em up levels, and Ben took on the platforming levels. But none of us wanted to do the treasure hunting, so we just kept putting it off. We got the GameCube in 2005, and there were too many games we wanted to play instead of focusing on one game we would play the hell out of for a bit and then put away. But we kept the same save file, gradually working on it through the course of our lives, with hundreds of hours of play time and years of experience, always making a couple steps closer to finishing it. This went on for years, through schools, through homes, through jobs, through entire phases of our lives individually and as a family. Until 2016.
I was in a bad way Christmas 2016. By this point I was 23. I was having terrible panic attacks, and I was about to drop out of university to get my head right. That's a story for another day. It had been a big year, and a particularly big year for my siblings. I was used to all of us being in the same city, all nearby so that we could hang out at the drop of a hat. But that fall we'd gone our separate ways for undergrad degrees. I was staying put in our hometown for school, Aidan was moving three hours away for college, and Ben was moving two hours away for university. My mom had also moved house, still the same city just further away, and my grandmother had passed away earlier that year. This wasn't the main reason I was having a nervous breakdown, but it was weighing on me. It was a big change of life, something I have never handled well. But my brothers were home for Christmas. I wanted to do something nice for us, something to make the time we had to feel special. I knew it was an irrational thought, but for some reason, the state I was in, I felt like I would never see my brothers again after that Christmas, like they would just never come home again after that.
So, I plugged in the GameCube, pulled our rental-stickered copy out of the shelf, and started working through the rest of the A-Ranks in Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. I only remember needing to do all the treasure hunting levels before I got it done. I thought it would be a slog but honestly it was kind of relaxing. I thought it was so funny, I put it off for years because of the way I thought of it when I was a kid, but playing it as an adult was very manageable. I'd definitely played worse games. When I got that last A-Rank, I turned the console off so that we could experience the bonus level together.
Fast forward eight years to Christmas 2022. I'm finishing my first semester of my Master's degree. I have been blessed with a free-ride scholarship thanks to the federal government and more income than I'd ever seen before in my life. I wanted to treat myself, so I bought an Xbox Series X. I chose the Series X entirely because I wanted to play some old Xbox 360 games at 60fps from the frame boost effect. One of the compatible games was the Xbox Live Arcade port of Sonic Adventure 2. By this point I'd already made my 30/30 list. I thought I'd knock out another game on this list, so I tested out my brand new $805 game console (yeah man Canadian prices are crazy) on a 10-year-old port of a 20-year-old game. But it was enhanced with Auto HDR, so hey, you can really see every screaming pore on those Dreamcast textures.
And obviously I had a great time. It's my favorite videogame. I knew it by heart. But something didn't feel right. I tried to sit down to write this entry about it, but the story didn't feel complete. And then I realized what needed to happen: I needed to complete the game, and this time do it alone.
Naturally I put it off two years. Grad school is tough, and a lot of other things needed to take priority. I knew that it wasn't the time yet. It only really felt right this past Christmas in 2024. I couldn't tell you what it was, I just knew it was time.
I've been completing Sonic games for years. I adored Sonic Frontiers and Shadow Generations, and I'd already completed Sonic Colors and Sonic Lost World in years prior. I'd also finally dragged my ass through completing Sonic Forces. I got it in my head that I was going to try to get every achievement in every Sonic game I could play on my Series X after finishing Sonic X Shadow Generations. I felt even more emboldened to go back to Sonic Adventure 2 after seeing Sonic the Hedgehog 3 at my local movie theater. I thought for sure the movie was going to be garbage like the other two movies, but I never stopped smiling the whole way through. Like I said, I just knew it was time to complete Sonic Adventure 2.
And it was an experience. I went through peaks and valleys playing it. Trying to A-Rank City Escape and Radical Highway, literally the first high-speed platforming levels in the game, proved to be an immediate hump. I spent days trying just to get an A on the very first mission of these first levels. It made me almost give up on the whole premise.
But the biggest valley was easily the Chao Garden. I hate Chao Gardens. I've never liked them. They're supposedly the only thing critics and players can agree on as unambiguously good content, but I've always always always hated them. Grinding out the same levels for the necessary Chao food to raise their stats high enough to finish the Chao minigames annoyed me so much that I almost pleaded to my roommate to raise my Chao for me. This was also the only point in my completion where I relied on a glitch to get through it. There's a glitch where, depending on how close you are to your Chao when you feed it, the drives and animals you can feed it won't disappear, so you can keep reusing the same one. This makes levelling your Chao a lot easier because everything is single-use only otherwise. In the words of the great Gordan Lightfoot, "It's alright for some, but not alright for me."
But it made it all the sweeter when I finally unlocked the last emblem. This monumental task, which I'd only been able to do with help through most of my life across hundreds of hours, I'd worked down to about 60 hours of total play time.
You can see a lot of Sonic Adventure 2 in every Sonic game after it, especially in the structure of the Cyberspace levels in Sonic Frontiers. One of the incredible things about Frontiers is how it takes a lot of the half-baked ideas from past 3D Sonic games and makes them work: the shorter levels from Sonic Forces, the right-shoulder boost from Sonic Lost World which feels like driving a car, the open world of \Sonic Adventure, just a bunch of interesting things updated for a game that feels like a genuine new step in the direction of the franchise without sacrificing all the things it already does well. But while I was playing Sonic Adventure 2, I recognized in the five missions per level a more streamlined version present in each Frontiers level. Rather than having to complete missions as separate levels like in Adventure 2, every level in Frontiers has a standardized five goals you can complete per level, and getting the highest rank is something you do for the level overall instead of for each task. People joke about Sonic being shit, and honestly, yeah it's pretty shit sometimes. But no franchise rewards you for long-term investment like Sonic.
I'm burying the lead here a bit, dancing around the bonus level. It's a 3D recreation of the original Green Hill Zone from the first Sonic the Hedgehog. It's ultimately pretty underwhelming because every other stage lasts much longer. It is a faithful recreation, unlike the Sonic Generations Green Hill levels which massively expand the original into sprawling new levels. The Sonic Adventure 2 Green Hill is the garnish of a delicious cake rather than a whole dessert unto itself. But that doesn't make it feel any less special. It feels like a genuine reward for putting yourself through the whole ordeal of a 180-part gauntlet. And again, it rewards you for long-term investment.
The final narrative beats of Sonic Adventure 2 show long-time franchise heel Dr. Eggman teaming up with Sonic and friends for the first time to stop a threat bigger than himself. As the credits roll, you see Eggman reconciling with kid genius Tails, talking about how he always looked up to his grandfather. It's the first real human moment we ever see from Eggman. This was supposed to be the very end of the franchise, as Sega finally bowed out of the console wars with the commercial underperformance of their Dreamcast console. This was the last Sonic game developed for Sega hardware. By sending you back to Green Hill in the bonus level, you reckon with the franchise at its end, urging you to return to the beginning. It reads as an uncertain future after a notably hopepunk climax ripped straight out of Michael Bay's Armageddon. At the time, in that context, it reads as an admittance: we don't know what comes next, but look how far we've come, look at what we've accomplished, look at this incredible adventure we've taken together. If the good times are over, remember those good times and cherish them, renew them, hold to them without feeling stuck in them, and always keep moving forward.
This game was the impetus for the 30/30 project. I wanted to replay my favorite game on its 20th anniversary. I wanted to complete the game for myself for the first time. I got exactly what I wanted out of it.
Other games I've loved from 2001:
Mario Party 3 (N64), Devil May Cry (PS2), Super Smash Bros. Melee (NGC), Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (PS2)
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